What's Your Dorm Room Style?

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Dorm housing is the first opportunity most kids get to live any darn way they please, rather than the way their parents have always demanded. This often leads to slovenly mayhem. If you always hated taking out the garbage, you suddenly realize that you no longer have to, and that you can basically live in a cute little garbage fort if you really want to. If you want to keep a pile of Twinkies next to your desk, nobody will stop you. If your mom never let you have a pet weasel when you were eight, buddy, you can go to sleep on a bed of weasels for all anyone cares, as long as you can bamboozle your RA.

Of course, dorm rooms are about more than just weasels and debauchery. Some students actually express their personalities through their decor, and actually have decor instead of piles of laundry. Here are some possible dorm room archetypes.

Impossible Mess
Everything you own litters your floor, as do many things you don't own. You live in such abject squalor that if a future civilization discovered the ruins of your dorm room, it would conclude that our culture died of underpants and pizza. Your baffling messiness is not only confounding to women (as you are almost certainly a dude), but to other dudes as well. If some frat guys tried to prank you by leaving a goat in your room, it would merely fit right in among your surprising number of existing goats, and they would be forced to walk home in shame.

Utterly PristineYour clothes are organized by season, color, and cotton content, for expedient washing. If anyone brings food or a drink into your room, you always make sure there's a coaster under the drink, and a doily under the coaster, and a butler with a vacuum cleaner under the table. When people aren't looking, you spray them with disinfectant. "What was that?" they ask, turning around, but you are simply too good.

"Rules, Shmules"
Authority means nothing to you. You are like a loose cannon police detective, one who always pursues the truth despite pressure from City Hall, and who lights a bunch of pretty candles around your police station even when the Chief is like "No candles! You're a loose cannon!" Except in your case, City Hall is your school, the Chief is your RA, and your candles are all jammed into a toaster, which is sandwiched inside a George Foreman grill, whose frayed cord is plugged into a bundle of fireworks. Other kids love you, because you're the one with a mini-fridge, even if you only use it to house illegal snakes. RAs hate you because you should really just be in prison.

Refined And Artsy
Only the classiest French art adorns your walls, and the magnetized literary quotes on your door are also exclusively French, and there is a French person in your closet. Somewhere you display a black-and-white photograph, which you took yourself, of an overturned shopping cart. It represents capitalism.

School Spirit
Your school's sports culture is a joke and your mascot is downright embarrassing, but you still fill your room with supportive memorabilia anyway. "What is that?" other kids ask you, looking at your school sports poster, because they have never seen one before. "Go Stinkbugs!" you exclaim, and then do the Stinkbugs Cheer, which involves scuttling around on the ground and feeding on plant sap until you are swatted by a rolled-up newspaper. It is not a very good cheer, but you are super-enthusiastic anyway.

Trash Collector
Everything has some kind of value to you, even when that value isn't apparent to anybody else. You own smooshed penny souvenirs from places you've never been, a perfectly good piano stool you found submerged at the bottom of a lake, and a spring that looks like a Slinky, but instead of slinking all it does is stab people because it is dangerously sharp. "Can you believe someone threw out this rake??" you might ask your roommate, holding up a rake with only four rakey parts left. "We can totally use this as a coat rack!" you would then conclude, whereupon your roommate would go to bed, crying softly.